Saturday evening as I let our 12 year old dog Riley out for the last time of the night I looked down at her and saw this large lump coming out her left side. I was like holy crap! And yelled for Tommy to come. It was late and Riley wasn’t in any distress so we decided to take her to the vet the next morning. We secured an 11:20am appointment at an animal hospital we hadn’t used before but came recommended by my friend Jenn.
We get there and I’m noticing Riley panting excessively, and thought to myself that our other dog was not panting like this and it was cool out so why was she doing this? The vet tech came and weighed our girl who came in at 106 lbs, wow. I knew she was big but oh my. The doctor comes in and recommends x rays and asked if she could put a needle in the swollen area to see what was inside. Of course we said yes. She comes back that there was blood inside the lump but the x rays and regular bloodwork were fine. She offered to send the blood from that area to a hematologist so they could see if they were cancer cells. Again we said yes.
No cancer cells. Turns out Riley has a hematoma from what, we don’t know. All we could think of was that Lola, our anxiety riddled other dog who is very excitable (understatement) often pushes Riley out of the way to get down the back stairs to get to the backyard. Maybe Lola pushed Riley off the stairs? Riley is so so sweet she never fights back or pushes Lola back. Meanwhile Lola who is so attached to Riley, freaked the eff out when we left to bring Riley to the vet. And I learned that when dogs are in pain they pant a lot.
So the vet put Riley on an anti inflammatory for arthritis, pain meds, thyroid meds and something else that I don’t remember what for. I really thought this was some kind of tumor and we would have to say good bye. It was a terrible thought as those of you with pets can imagine or have lived through. So meds and you can imagine how much money later, we were on our way!
Menay O; mom to 4, Christian and thrift shopper on the side... 